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Searing Indictment

The language was harsh, the country's emotional, cathartic response even stronger. A nine-volume report issued by a truth commission on Thursday that blamed the Guatemalan military for the deaths of nearly 200,000 people in their 36-year civil war surprised nearly everyone with the bluntness and severity of its judgments and recommendations.

For the human rights advocates and victims' relatives who had long feared an official whitewash, that was a most gratifying result.

But for the high command of the Guatemalan military and their civilian allies, who had for years sought to gut and impede the commission and its work, the outcome was ominous, a shock that weakens their political standing and leaves them open to prosecution.

Especially important was the commission's conclusion that from 1981 to 1983, ''agents of the state committed acts of genocide against groups of the Mayan people.''

The destruction of more than 400 Indian villages at that time and the slaughter of their inhabitants, the commission also determined, ''came about with the knowledge, or by order, of the highest military authorities.''

Such a finding provides an avenue to file criminal charges against top military and other Government officials who thought that they would escape prosecution, thanks to an amnesty that the Guatemalan Congress approved in December 1996. That measure, condemned by human rights groups, forbids the prosecution of anyone who committed political offenses in the war.

Genocide, however, was a crime that does not fall under the amnesty, because it is not considered a political offense. As the commission report put it, ''the aggressive, racist and extremely cruel nature'' of the military's depredations in the countryside ''resulted in the extermination of defenseless Mayan communities.''

The most egregious offender, the report makes clear without condemning him by name, was Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, who as head of the Government from March 1982 to mid-1983 pursued a scorched-earth policy.

After the British detained Gen. Augusto Pinochet of Chile in the fall, calls in Guatemala for General Rios Montt to be held accountable for his administration's actions mounted, even though he is apparently protected by amnesties approved in the 1980's.

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From the start, the truth commission, formally the Commission for Historical Clarification, was intended to be ineffectual. The only way that the military would agree to its establishment at all, back in 1994 during negotiations on the topic, was on the condition that the final report not name or blame specific individuals for violations of human rights.

But when the commission began operations in 1997, just after the signing of the comprehensive peace settlement that ended the war, the Government, which still had military officers in place as advisers to President Alvaro Arzu Irigoyen and running the intelligence service, provided virtually no financial support. In a further effort to make the commission ineffectual, its investigators were initially told that they had six months to prepare their report.

But donations from foreign sources, primarily the United States Agency for International Development, allowed the commission and its German director, Christian Tomuschat, to open regional offices and cast a much wider net. The huge volume of material gathered enabled investigators, much to the annoyance of the military, to extend the mandate for nearly two years.

It is still too early to tell how Guatemala as a society will respond to the judgments, some of which had never been uttered in public before.

This is a presidential election year, and the issues are certain to be debated on the campaign trail, undoubtedly to the discomfort of General Rios Montt's Guatemalan Republican Front, which narrowly lost the presidency in a runoff four years ago and thinks that its chances this time are just as good.

The 1996 amnesty and peace agreement do permit individuals to bring charges against military officers or guerrilla leaders whom they believe committed murder, rape, torture and other abuses. Though the panel report cannot be used to lodge such accusations, human rights and religious groups have been compiling files on the most notorious of the more than 600 massacres for which the military is blamed, and they are widely expected to act soon.

But progress on emblematic human rights cases, like the massacre of a Mayan community at Xaman in 1995 and the murder of a well-known anthropologist, Myrna Mack, who was investigating genocide by the military, has been painfully slow.

The judicial system has been criticized by rights groups and the United Nations as corrupt and inefficient, and judges have been reluctant in the past to take on such cases.